Hooking Up
by mackerel sky
Summary: After The Girlfriend (welcome to the O.C., now with 98 percent less hoyay) Seth ruminates on Ryan’s sexiness…to women. Mostly.


Disclaimer: These are not my characters.

After the incident with Gabrielle, it struck Seth that Ryan could not possibly be a virgin. He did not want to ask, which was weird in a way, since they spoke about everything. He was now surprised at his own naïveté in having assumed that Ryan must be roughly as inexperienced as he was. It was true that very early on he had made a crack about losing their virginity to hookers and Ryan had given him an odd look, but at the time, in the middle of a chain of recreational suggestions, he had not bothered to interpret it.

"Hooking up" was about as vague a term as you could apply to sexual activity. Seth supposed it could potentially mean as little as recognition of mutual interest, although he assumed Ryan would not have used it for less than kissing, but it could also mean…who knew? Certainly fooling around. Possibly actual sex. 

The thing about it was the ease with which Ryan had slid into the intrigue of her advances. He was in no way the aggressor. At points she had been frankly predatory. And yet far from being emasculated by her forwardness, Ryan had assumed a pantherish aplomb. As if it were entirely unremarkable to him that such a luscious fantasy of a woman should want him. As if there were no doubt in his mind that if he let her get her way she would not be disappointed.

And, Seth had to admit, there was no reason to think she would be. When Ryan was relaxed, he had a physical comfort level with himself that was intensely masculine and vaguely feline, a hard-muscled languor that, Seth imagined, would look very appropriate lying in bed after sex. And girls liked him. Summer had thrown herself at him that first night purely on the basis of…what? His pheromones? And for all her pretense of materialism, Seth knew perfectly well that Summer was exactly the kind of person who would toss away her gilded life in an instant to run off with a hot con man or gardener who blew her mind in bed. A sensualist who fought it. That was pretty much the opposite of Marissa. Marissa wanted to have the kind of principles that led a person to sacrifice comfort for love, but at the end of the day, she would almost certainly choose safety. As she had repeatedly in the time she had known Ryan.

His infatuation with Marissa was the one thing about Ryan that was totally unsexy. Her unsexiness made his interest in her more plaintive than ardent. He was so tentative with her, so cautious, so chivalrously correct. And Marissa was exactly the kind of girl to whom a faint-hearted, sexually insecure boy (obviously not a good description of Ryan) would fantasize about losing his virginity. She was fragile and perfect and wholesome and sincere. A gentle creature. There might be fumbling, of course, but her nervousness, her newness, would always exceed the boy's, so that by the end of it, he would be, triumphantly, no longer a virgin, and she would be, with downcast but sparkling eyes, demurely convinced of his prowess.

As fantasies went, Seth had to say, that was more than a little bit minty. A guy should want his first time to be hot, hungry, sweaty, creative, physically exhausting, punctuated by those moments when the entirety of your skin suddenly caught fire and also by low moans (yours) and high, urgent, giggly shrieks (hers)---okay, now he was just getting himself worked up. But seriously, sex with Marissa sounded like a whole soft-focus, unsweaty, kittens-and-puppies fest with, like, really dorky music. Oh, except maybe she would want punk. For her first time. He started laughing.

Ryan looked at him with raised eyebrows. They were in the pool, their floats at right angles, feet bumping occasionally. "You cracking yourself up over there?"

"I…uh…yeah. Believe me when I say you don't want to know."

Ryan shrugged, tilted his head back, closed his eyes. Seth watched him. There was a strange margin of confusion sometimes, when he was watching Ryan. Certainly there were ways in which he wanted to be more like him, more sexy and self-contained and silent like that, but there were also ways in which he wanted Summer to be more like Ryan, with that loyal intensity, that pitch-perfect focus on Seth… Which either made no sense at all or made a kind of sense that he did not want to investigate too closely. 

"So, Ryan. I'm thinking Marissa might seem the tiniest bit, uh, tame, after your little situation with Gabrielle."

Ryan did not open his eyes. "I thought you weren't going to tell me."

"Yeah, well."

"And that was cracking you up."

"Actually, if you must know, I was having very dirty, personal thoughts about the soundtrack for Marissa's first time." Ryan sat up looking wounded. Seth decided not to make a Stiff Little Fingers crack. "I'm sorry, man, that was pretty tasteless, sometimes my mind just kind of gets away from me…I was doing soundtracks for everyone's sex life, you know, some people are little bit dancetrack, some people are a little bit funk…" he could hear himself babbling, ended lamely, "so I just got to the M's."

Ryan had closed his eyes again. "You were going alphabetically?"

"Um, yeah, dude, alphabetically."

"So you haven't gotten to us yet."

"Nope, not yet."

"Good. Why don't you just stop now then before I have to come over there and drown you?"

"Well, for you actually, I have some ideas that are, uh, really quite provocative. Mind-blowing is probably not too strong a word. In fact, I think you really might want to hear---"

Without appearing to have moved at all, Ryan yanked Seth's float out from under him, tumbling him into the water. Seth surfaced, hair plastered to his head, laughing. Ryan had flipped into a defensive position, but Seth did not attack, just rolled onto his back, kicking his feet lazily and floating toward the middle of the pool. When he was sure no retaliation was in the offing, Ryan leaned back into his float again and closed his eyes.

"All right," he said. "Tell me. What songs have you picked out for me?"

"No way, dude. Now it's weird."

"Why is it weird now?"

"Out in the open like this. All serious or hypothetical or something. I mean, you can think whatever you want in the privacy of your own head, but if I say it out loud it's all like, whoa, there's the visual, and then I'm just like, picturing you having sex. And that's just not right."

Ryan smiled and said nothing. He still had not opened his eyes.

Seth said, "So I'm just pretty much going to pretend we never even had this conversation. Cool?"

"Cool."


End file.
